HE controversy over Alang started on the other side of
the world and a few years back, in Baltimore, Maryland, along the ghostly
industrial shoreline of the city's outer harbor, where old highway signs
warn motorists about heavy smoke that no longer pours from the stacks.
Early in 1996 a Baltimore Sun reporter named Will Englund was out
on the water when he noticed a strange sight -- the giant aircraft carrier
Coral Sea lying partially dismantled beside a dock, "in a million
pieces." Englund looked into the situation and discovered that the
Coral Sea was a waterfront fiasco of bankruptcy, lawsuits, worker
injuries, toxic spills, and outright criminality. Of particular interest
to Baltimore, where thousands of shipyard workers had been disabled by
asbestos, was evidence of wholesale exposure once again to that dangerous
dust. The U.S. Navy, which still owned the hull, was guilty, it seemed, at
least of poor oversight. Englund's first report ran as a front-page story
in April of 1996. The Sun's chief editor, John Carroll, then
decided to go after the subject in full. He brought in his star
investigative reporter, Gary Cohn, a quick-witted man who had the sort of
street smarts that could complement Englund's more cerebral style.

The two reporters worked on the story for more than a year. Their
investigation centered on the United States, where shipbreaking had become
a nearly impossible business, for the simple reason that the cost of
scrapping a ship correctly was higher than the value of its steel. The
only reason any remnant of the domestic industry still existed was that
since 1994 all government-owned ships -- demilitarized Navy warships and
also decrepit merchant vessels culled from the nation's mothballed
"reserve fleet" by the U.S. Maritime Administration -- had been kept out
of the overseas scrap market as a result of an Environmental Protection
Agency ban against the export of polychlorinated biphenyls, the hazardous
compounds known as PCBs, which were used in ships' electrical and
hydraulic systems. In practice, the export ban did not apply to the much
larger number of U.S.-flagged commercial vessels, which were (and are
still) exported freely for overseas salvage. Hoping somehow to make the
economics work, American scrappers bought the government ships (or the
scrapping rights) at giveaway prices, tore into them as expediently as
possible, and in most cases went broke anyway. As a result of these
defaults, the Defense Department was forced to repossess many of the
vessels that it had awarded to U.S. contractors. Conditions in the
remaining yards were universally abysmal. The problems existed nationwide
-- in California, Texas, North Carolina, and, of course, Maryland. Englund
and Cohn were surprised by the lack of previous reporting, and they were
fascinated by the intensity of the individual stories -- of death or
injury in hot, black holds, of environmental damage, and of repeated
lawbreaking and cover-ups. Cohn especially was used to working in the
underbelly of society, but not even he had imagined that abuses on such a
scale could still exist in the United States. Later I asked him if he had
been motivated by anger or moral outrage. He mulled over the question. "I
don't know that it was so much anger. I think we discovered a lot
of things that were wrong and needed correcting. But I wouldn't say that
we walked around angry all the time." Nonetheless the subject became their
obsession.

At the same time that Cohn and Englund were investigating the story,
the Navy and the Maritime Administration, faced with a growing backlog of
rotting hulls, were pressuring the EPA to lift its export ban. They wanted
the freedom to sell government ships for a profit on the South Asian scrap
market. Englund and Cohn realized that their investigation required a
visit to the place where many of these ships would end up if the ban were
lifted -- a faraway beach called Alang.

The Sun hired an Indian stringer to help with logistics,
enlisted a photographer, and in February of 1997 sent the team to India.
Alang was still an innocent place: the reporters were free to go where
they pleased, to take pictures openly, and to pay no mind to Captain
Pandey. The reporters were shocked by what they saw -- to them Alang was
mostly a place of death. And they were not entirely wrong. Soon after they
left Alang, sparks from a cutting torch ignited the residual gases in a
tanker's hold and caused an explosion that killed fifteen workers -- or
fifty. Alang was the kind of place where people hardly bothered to count.

The Sun's shipbreaking report hit the newsstands for three days
in December of 1997. It concentrated first on the Navy's failures inside
the United States and then on Alang. A little storm broke out in
Washington. The Maryland senator Barbara A. Mikulski promptly pronounced
herself "appalled" and requested a Senate investigation into the Navy's
conduct. She called simultaneously for the EPA's export ban to stay in
place and for an overhaul of the domestic program to address the labor and
environmental issues brought up by the Sun articles. Though
Mikulski spoke in stern moral terms, what she apparently also had in mind
was the creation of a new Baltimore jobs program -- involving the clean,
safe, and therefore expensive disposal of ships, to be funded in some way
by the federal government. The Navy had been embarrassed by the
Sun's report, and was in no position to counter Mikulski's attack.
It answered weakly that it welcomed discussions "to ensure [that] the
complex process of ship disposal is conducted in an environmentally sound
manner and in a way that protects the health and safety of workers."
Mikulski shot back a letter to Secretary of Defense William Cohen:
"Frankly, I was disappointed in their tepid comments. We don't need hollow
promises and clichés. We need an action plan and concrete solutions."

Her opinion was shared by other elected officials with struggling
seaports. The Maryland representative Wayne T. Gilchrest announced that
his maritime subcommittee would hold hearings. The California
representative George Miller said, "I feel strongly that contributing to
the pollution and labor exploitation found at places like Alang, India, is
not a fitting end for these once-proud ships." Miller also argued that
since the Navy was paying the cleanup costs at its old bases, it should
pay for the scrapping of its old ships as well. It made sense. Certainly
the U.S. government could afford it.

In the last days of 1997 the Navy surrendered, declaring that it was
suspending plans to export its ships. Reluctantly the Maritime
Administration agreed to do the same. The government had a backlog of 170
ships awaiting destruction -- with others scheduled to join them. Faced
with the continuing decay of those ships -- and the possibility that some
of them would soon sink -- the Defense Department formed an interagency
shipbreaking panel and gave it two months to report back with
recommendations. The panel suffered from squabbling, but it dutifully went
through the motions of deliberation.

During a public hearing in March of 1998 the speakers made just the
sort of dull and self-serving statements that one would expect. Ross
Vincent, of the Sierra Club, said, "Waste should be dealt with where it is
generated."

George Miller said, "A global environmental leader like the United
States should not have as a national policy the exporting of its toxic
waste to developing countries ill equipped to handle it."

Barbara Mikulski said, "We ought to take a look at how we can turn this
into an opportunity for jobs in our shipyards."

And Murphy Thornton, of the shipbuilders' union, said, "Those ships
should be buried with honor."

In April of 1998 Englund and Cohn won the Pulitzer Prize for
investigative reporting. That same month the shipbreaking panel issued its
final report -- a bland document that reflexively called for better
supervision of the domestic industry and wistfully maintained the hope of
resuming exports, but also suggested that a Navy "pilot project" explore
the costs of clean ship disposal in the United States. By September of
last year an appropriation had moved through Congress, and the future
finally seemed clear: the pilot project included only four out of 180
ships, but it involved an initial sum of $13.3 million, to be awarded on a
"cost plus" basis to yards in Baltimore, Brownsville, Philadelphia, and
San Francisco -- and by definition it was just the start.

This was Washington in action. A problem had been identified and
addressed through a demonstrably open and democratic process, and a
solution had been found that was affordable and probably about right.
Nonetheless, there was also something wrong about the process -- an
elusive quality not exactly of corruption but of a repetitive and
transparent dishonesty that seemed to imply either that the public was
naive or that it could not be trusted with straight talk. Even the
Baltimore Sun had joined in: in September of 1998, when Vice
President Al Gore went through the motions of imposing another (redundant)
ban on exports, an approving Sun editorial claimed that the
prohibition "especially benefits the poorly paid and untrained workers in
the wretched shipyards of South Asia." Patently absurd assertions like
that may help to explain why shipbreaking reform, despite all the
trappings of a public debate, including coverage in the national press and
even ultimately the Pulitzer Prize, actually attracted very little
attention in the United States. The people who might naturally have spared
this issue a few moments of thought may have had little patience for the
rhetoric. Or maybe the subject just seemed too small and far away. For
whatever reason, the fact is that the American public did not notice the
linguistic nicety distinguishing the government ships in question from the
much larger number of commercial U.S.-flagged ships, which would
remain untouched by the reforms. So an argument about double standards,
which should at least have been heard, was expediently ignored. Seen from
outside the United States, the pattern was hard to figure out. India, of
course, paid attention to the controversy. At Alang, where plenty of
American commercial vessels still came to die, people couldn't understand
why the government's ships were banned. I could never quite bridge the
cultural gap to explain the logic. How does one say that the process had
simply become an exercise in democracy from above? A subject had been tied
off and contained.

Pollution's Poster Child

IED off and contained in America, that is. As it
turned out, the Sun's exposé did affect Alang, but in a way that no
one in Washington had anticipated. The surprise came close on the heels of
the Pulitzer Prize, when the hellish image of Alang landed hard in
Scandinavia and the countries of the Rhine, where it ignited a popular
movement for shipbreaking reform. If it seems unlikely that ordinary
people would genuinely care about a problem so abstract and far away,
nevertheless in Northern Europe millions of them did. In The Hague a
typically progressive Dutch official explained to me that his countrymen
had less-frantic lives than Americans, and could spare the time for
altruism.

The campaign, which continues today, was led from Greenpeace's global
headquarters, in Amsterdam, by plainspoken activists who started in where
American reformers hadn't ventured -- going after the big commercial
shipping lines. By this past spring the activists had muscled their way in
to the maritime lawmaking forums and had begun to threaten the very
existence of Alang.

Their task was made easier from the outset by the work of the emotive
Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who came upon the story when
it was young, in 1989, and captured unforgettable images of gaunt laborers
and broken ships on the beach in Bangladesh. In 1993 Salgado exhibited his
photographs at several shows in Europe and in his superb picture book
Workers, which was widely seen. An awareness of shipbreaking's
particular hardships began to percolate in the European consciousness, as
did the suspicion that perhaps somehow a caring West should intervene.
Then, in 1995, Greenpeace had a famous brush with marine "salvage" when it
discovered that Shell intended to dispose of a contaminated oil-storage
platform, the giant Brent Spar, by sinking it in the North
Atlantic. Greenpeace boarded the platform, led a consumer boycott against
Shell (primarily at gas stations in Germany), and with much fanfare forced
the humiliated company to back down. The Brent Spar was towed to a
Norwegian fjord and scrapped correctly, an expensive job that continued
until last summer. Greenpeace had once again shown itself to be a powerful
player on the European scene.

It was powerful because it was popular, and popular because it was
audacious, imaginative, and incorruptible. It also had a knack for
entertaining its friends. When the drama of Alang came into clear view,
Greenpeace recognized the elements for a new campaign. The organization
was not being cynical. For many years it had been involved in a fight to
stop the export of toxic wastes from rich countries to poor -- a struggle
that had culminated in an international accord known as the Basel Ban, an
export prohibition, now in effect, to which the European Union nations had
agreed. Greenpeace considered the Basel Ban to be an important victory,
and it saw the shipbreaking trade as an obvious violation: if the ships
were not themselves toxins, they were permeated with toxic materials, and
were being sent to South Asia as a form of waste. Greenpeace was convinced
that ships owned by companies based in the nations that had signed the
accord, no matter what flag those ships flew, were clearly banned from
export. It was a good argument. Moreover, the shipping industry's
counterargument -- that the ships went south as ships, becoming
waste only after hitting the beaches -- provided a nice piece of double
talk that Greenpeace could hold up for public ridicule. And Alang, with
its filth and smoke, provided perfect panoramas to bring the point home.
So Greenpeace went to war.

It was October of 1998, a year and a half after the Sun's visit.
Captain Pandey was on guard against trouble, but he must have been looking
in the wrong direction. A group of Greenpeace activists got onto the beach
by posing as shipping buffs interested in the story of a certain German
vessel. They said they wanted the ship's wheel. But they also wandered off
and took pictures of the squalor, and they scraped up samples from the
soil, the rubble, and the shantytown shacks. After analyzing those
samples, two German laboratories quantified what Greenpeace already knew
-- that Alang was powerfully poisonous, particularly for the laborers who
worked, ate, and slept at dirt level there. Greenpeace issued the findings
in a comprehensive report, the best yet written on Alang. The report
discussed the medical consequences of the contaminants, and described the
risk of industrial accidents, which were rumored to cause 365 deaths a
year. "Every day one ship, every day one dead," went the saying about
Alang, and although the report's authors admitted that there was no way to
verify this, it was a formulation that people remembered.

Greenpeace needed a culprit to serve as a symbol of the European
shipping business, and it found one in the tradition-bound P&O
Nedlloyd, an Anglo-Dutch cargo line that was openly selling its old ships
on the Asian scrap market. In the shadowy world of shipping, where elusive
companies establish offshore headquarters and run their vessels under
flags of convenience, P&O Nedlloyd was a haplessly anchored target: it
had a big office building on a street in Rotterdam, and a staff of modern,
middle-class Europeans, altruists who tended to sympathize with Greenpeace
and would quietly keep it apprised of P&O Nedlloyd's intentions and
movements. Also, because a related company called P&O Cruises operated
a fleet of English Channel ferries and cruise ships, P&O Nedlloyd was
likely to be sensitive to public opinion. In November of 1998 Greenpeace
staged a protest at the company's offices, erecting a giant photograph of
a scrapped ship at Alang along with a statement in Dutch: "P&O
Nedlloyd burdens Asia with it." The press arrived, and eventually a
company director emerged from the building to talk to the activists. He
did not appear to be afraid or angry. He said it wasn't fair to single out
P&O Nedlloyd, and he made the argument that coordinated international
regulation was needed. International regulation was exactly what
Greenpeace wanted -- but when the next day's paper came out with a
photograph captioned "P&O and Greenpeace agree," Greenpeace denied
that there had been any understanding.

The truth was that Greenpeace needed resistance from P&O Nedlloyd,
and it would have had to rethink its strategy if the company had submitted
to its demands and obediently stopped scrapping in Asia. But of course
P&O Nedlloyd did not submit -- and, for that matter, could not afford
to submit. After its brief attempt at openness, it went into just the sort
of sullen retreat that Greenpeace might have hoped for. Greenpeace staged
a series of shipside banner unfurlings, and it dogged a doomed P&O
Nedlloyd container vessel, appropriately called the Encounter Bay,
as it went about the world on its final errands. Millions of Greenpeace
sympathizers watched with glee. P&O Nedlloyd was so unnerved by the
campaign that in the spring of last year it apparently painted a new name
on a ship bound for the Indian beach, in order, perhaps, to disguise who
owned it. Greenpeace found out and shouted in indignation. When P&O
Nedlloyd then refused to comment, it began to look like an old man turned
to evil. This made for good theater -- especially against the backdrop of
the ubiquitous pictures of Alang. With public opinion now fully aroused,
the Northern European governments began to move, introducing the first
dedicated shipbreaking initiatives into the schedules of the European
Union and the International Maritime Organization -- the London-based body
for the law of the seas. In June of last year the Netherlands sponsored an
international shipbreaking conference in Amsterdam -- a meeting whose tone
was established at the outset by an emotional condemnation of the industry
by the Dutch Minister of Transport. It was obvious to everyone there that
the movement for reform was gathering strength. It was hard to know what
changes would result -- and which shipbreaking nations would be affected.
But the reformers were ambitious, and their zeal was genuine. I thought
Pandey had reason to be afraid.

N London last fall I met an affable Englishman named
Brian Parkinson, who worked as a trade and operations adviser for the
International Chamber of Shipping, an umbrella group of national shipowner
associations. Parkinson had a natural appreciation for the anarchy of the
sea and an equally natural aversion to the Greenpeace campaign. He said,
"Shipping gets blamed for everything. Global warming. Why the British
don't have a decent football team." For lunch we went to a dark little pub
that should have been on the docks. Parkinson told me that he was near the
end of his career and was looking forward to retirement. Meanwhile,
however, he was struggling gamely to keep pace with the times. He said, "A
ship registered in Panama, owned by a Norwegian, operating in the U.S.,
and sold in India is not an export -- but we're not making that
argument." He said, "Maybe there are things that shipowners can
do." First, he had in mind a nice bit of public relations: "We're looking
at creating an inventory of hazardous components, a good-housekeeping
guide. We want to know how we can present the ship to the recyclers in the
best possible way." I complimented him on the word "recyclers," and he
said yes, right, it was rather good, wasn't it? But he was toying with
something a bit more real as well -- a proposal for voluntary
self-regulation, under which the industry would inspect and certify the
yards at the Asian beaches and then factor in good behavior when choosing
which ones to use. He mentioned that Shell had already sent an inspector
to a yard at Alang, and that he was said to have written an in-house
report. As evidence of progress, this seemed pretty slim. I asked
Parkinson what was to keep his scheme from becoming a two-tiered
arrangement, whereby a few image-conscious companies would accept the
expense of working with certified yards while all the other shipowners
continued with business as usual, selling their vessels to the highest
bidders. He said he worried about that too.

At the central train station in Amsterdam a few days later I met
Parkinson's opponent, a leader of the Greenpeace campaign, Claire Tielens,
a young Dutch woman with a walker's stride and an absolutist's frank gaze.
We went to the station café and talked.

I asked her if she had visited India yet, and she said no, but that for
several years she had been a reporter for an environmental news service in
the Philippines, so she knew about Third World conditions. I said, "Why
did you choose Alang? Why does it seem worse to you than the other
industrial sites in India?"

She answered, "Because here there is a very direct link with Western
companies."

"But if it's Western companies at Alang, versus Indian companies
somewhere else, what difference does it make to the world's environment?"

"Because those Western companies pretend to us here with glossy
leaflets that they are so environmentally responsible. And it is a shame
when they export their shit to the developing world."

"But from your environmental point of view," I asked, "what difference
does it make who the polluter is, and whether he's a hypocrite or not? I
mean, what is it about shipbreaking? And what is it about Alang?"

I kept phrasing my questions badly. She kept trying to answer me
directly, and failing, and going over the same ground. Without intending
to, I was being unfair. She should have said, "We needed to make some
choices, and so we chose Alang. It was easy -- and look how far we've
come." I think that would have been about right. Instead she said, "Even
by Indian standards, Alang is bad." But India has a billion people, and it
is famously difficult to define.